On February 17, at the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, I will be speaking on the Earth’s outstanding fitness for supporting life. This is a subject that we can treat both theoretically and observationally. The observational evidence over the last quarter century has seen dramatic development by the advent of many techniques that detect and characterize extra-solar planets (i.e., planets orbiting other stars). These techniques have yielded to date a rich harvest of over 5,500 exo-planets, with varying degrees of detail about their characteristics, including their size, mass, orbits, and in some cases their atmospheric constituents. We can now begin to ask, and in future years continue to reassess, whether the special conditions the Earth satisfies are ubiquitous or unique. Look here for more information about the conference, with a link to register.
